Mountain View, CA – October 17, 2013 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced that Sharks Sports & Entertainment (SSE), parent company of the popular National Hockey League (NHL) club the San Jose Sharks, has selected and deployed FlashArray to support its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). After a rigorous selection process, SSE selected Pure Storage for its powerful blend of inline data reduction, deduplication and compression technologies, which maximize storage utilization and deliver massive performance gains for VDI and other performance workloads, for less than the cost of mechanical disk.

Based in San Jose, California, Sharks Sports & Entertainment manages several sports and entertainment properties that include the San Jose Sharks of the NHL and Massachusetts-based Worcester Sharks of the American Hockey League (AHL). Additionally, SSE manages the SAP Center at San Jose, a popular sports and entertainment venue that is home to the San Jose Sharks and features concerts and events year round, as well as several public ice facilities throughout the Bay Area, including Sharks Ice at San Jose.

With its venues and users spread across the United States, SSE opted to roll out a comprehensive Citrix XenDesktop 7.0 VDI deployment to connect them, however, its existing legacy storage maxed out after adding only a dozen users. In order to migrate to a virtualized environment that could support its distributed knowledge workers with BYOD, SSE needed a higher performance storage solution to sustain it.

SSE's Director of Information Technology Uy Ut assessed a wide range of enterprise storage options that included the leading disk, flash/disk hybrids, and all-flash storage array solutions. After a thorough evaluation process, he concluded that the Pure Storage FlashArray was the most cost-competitive solution that could deliver a uniform, non-disruptive user experience to its distributed workforce, and meet the performance requirements of their VDI deployment at scale, with room to grow in the future.

"We wanted a 'set-it-and-forget-it' product that would give our distributed organization tier zero storage performance, without a tier zero price tag. We evaluated all the available storage options and vendors on the market – no one even came close to meeting our requirements like Pure Storage," said Ut. "FlashArray smoked the competition in terms of the performance gains we needed to support our VDI rollout, and offered rapid time to deployment, simplified storage management, and a scale out/scale up architecture at cost parity with mechanical disk and hybrids solutions. The decision to go with Pure Storage was a no-brainer."

The effects of SSE's FlashArray implementation on its data infrastructure were immediate and tangible: the company is now achieving up to 12:1 data reduction and sub-millisecond latency—not just for VDI, but across all its performance enterprise applications and workloads, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL databases, file shares, and virtual applications.

"Everything is easier with Pure Storage. They have created more than just a great product—they've created a great company. The Pure support team makes me feel like we're all in it together, and treats every user and application in our environment like a first-class citizen," said Ut.

With support from Pure Storage, SSE has now successfully rolled out its VDI deployment – over 250 desktops nationwide – without added IT complexity, and has realized significant operational and storage cost savings by replacing its legacy disk arrays. And FlashArray's resilient, scalable architecture and non-disruptive capacity upgrades will support future growth to SSE's organization and virtual desktop infrastructure at scale.

"FlashArray has delivered on its promises in every dimension and exceeded our very high expectations – we're beyond thrilled with the performance benefits," said Ut. "When our users don't have to think about IT, they are able to sell more tickets and put better players on the ice. This is not only a huge win for me, but also for our employees, players and fans."

"FlashArray is a perfect solution for companies like SSE that are implementing or expanding a VDI deployment, because it delivers the performance, resiliency, scalability and efficiency that VDI requires," said Matt Kixmoeller, VP Products at Pure Storage. "At Pure, we believe that delivering a fundamentally better storage experience is about more than just great technology – it requires that we deliver excellence across the entire product lifecycle."

Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data center. When compared to traditional disk-centric arrays, the Pure Storage FlashArray is 10x faster and 10x more space and power efficient, for less than the cost of mechanical disk per gigabyte stored. FlashArray was purpose-built to uniquely deliver the benefits of flash together with inline data reduction, deduplication and compression to optimize storage utilization, performance and cost-savings for a variety of enterprise workloads, including server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics), and cloud computing. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.

The Pure Storage and “P” logo marks, Purity Operating Environment, and RAID-3D are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.